Historic Spacecraft Tested at NASA Plum Brook Station

PERKINS TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- Credit the NASA Plum Brook Station for playing a pivotal role in a historic launch set to take place Saturday.

Three days prior, on Wednesday, SpaceX -- the world's leading private company in manufacturing and launching spacecraft -- intended to launch its Crew Dragon spacecraft from Florida.

Poor weather, however, postponed the groundbreaking event until this weekend.

Nationally, it's significant for two main reasons: one, this represents the first time ever a private company will send humans into orbit, and two, since 2011, when the Space Shuttle program disbanded, that astronauts will depart from U.S. soil.

Locally, it's important because work for this mission took place at NASA Plum Brook -- a world-class, one-of-a-kind testing facility spanning across four townships in Erie County, Ohio.

Workers performed experiments and analyses on a prototype of the Crew Dragon, without astronauts aboard, in 2019. This acted as a necessary precursor to perfect the actual vehicle set to launch, with astronauts, on Saturday.

Testing at Plum Brook "allowed NASA and SpaceX to verify its ability to withstand the extreme conditions it will experience during its flight, returning American astronauts on American rockets to the International Space Station," NASA spokesman Jimi Russell said.

History lesson

Work on the first iteration of the Crew Dragon started eight years ago.

"Dragon made history in 2012 when it became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the space station, a feat previously achieved only by governments," according to a statement from SpaceX. "But Dragon was also designed from the beginning to carry people (and today) that is a reality."

NASA workers supervised testing on the Crew Dragon in two different testing arenas at Plum Brook:

∫ First at the In-Space Propulsion Facility to determine if it could fight through space's most extreme conditions while in orbit; The facility is Earth's only chamber capable of testing full-scale, upper-stage vehicles and rocket engines under high-altitude and space-like conditions.

∫ Then at the Reverberant Acoustic Test Facility to determine the effects of noise during launch; The facility is Earth's most powerful testing chamber of its type. It can reach an overall sound pressure level of 163 decibels. For comparison, jets from about 80 feet away are 150 decibels.

"SpaceX wanted to come to Plum Brook because of the size of our test chamber," said Hal Weaver, a Plum Brook employee who acted as the project manager when work occurred at the Erie County-based station.

"The Dragon vehicle is really large, and there aren't a whole lot of test facilities where it can fit into and do the type of thermal vacuum testing it requires."